Quotes About Power

that which is subtle can be more powerful.

Then, slowly, it filled her. An urge, like none she had ever known, rose out of her depths, grew in her throat, and burst from her mouth in a primal scream of victory. She did it! At that moment, in a lonely valley in the middle of a vast continent, somewhere near the undefined boundary of the desolate northern loess steppes and the wetter continental steppes to the south, a young woman stood with a bone club in her hand—and felt powerful. She could survive. She would survive.

The Shamud had told him once that the Mother favoured him so much no woman could refuse him, not even the Mother Herself could refuse him – that was his gift – but he warned him to be wary. Gifts from the Mother were not an unmixed blessing, they put one in Her debt.

Crackpots have a vote like everyone else...enough crackpots could vote a mayor into office.

There are neither good or bad colonialist: there are colonialists.

I hate victims who respect their executioners

Una vez que ha estallado la libertad en el alma de un hombre, los dioses no pueden nada más contra ese hombre. Pues es un asunto de hombres, y los otros hombres —sólo a ellos— les corresponde dejarlo correr o estrangularlo

So the puppy (the future George III) won't be bewolfenbütteled, he says. I'll teach him whether to defy me. I say he shall be bewolfenbütteled, and like it! (George II on a proposal to marry his grandson to a princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Jean Plaidy.)

Imagine anyone asking Henry VIII or Elizabeth to settle a bill!

I will write my name in fire red.

Only seven or eight, and yet she knew so exactly how to be cruel and who it was safe to be cruel to. One must admire Nature..

Let's say that you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple — no, that I think you haven't got. And that's the right you hold most dearly, isn't it? You must be able to despise the people you exploit.

Because he has money he's a kind of god. Because I have none I'm a kind of worm. A worm because I've failed and I have no money. A worm because I'm not even sure if I hate you.

Those who hold power know very well the difference between a right and a permission … A right in a strict sense of the term gives access to the exercise of a power, at the expense of another power. A permission doesn't diminish the power of the one who gives it; it doesn't augment the power of the one who gets it. It makes his life easier, which is not nothing.

That was the thing to remember about all monsters, They love to frighten people, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run.

It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.

When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories. ... I can change the story. I am the story.

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected.

Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.

I can't do it. I've been here before and it's not a room with a view. The only power I have is the negative power of withdrawal. If I don't withdraw I have no power at all. A relationship where one person has no power or negative power, isn't a relationship, it's the bond between master and slave.